Oliver Wendell Holmes (from Literary Friends and Acquaintance) eBook

to make up for these with careful circumspection.
He wished to know the character of the person who
made overtures to his acquaintance, for he was aware
that his friendship lay close to it; he wanted to be
sure that he was a nice person, and though I think
he preferred social quality in his fellow-man, he
did not refuse himself to those who had merely a sweet
and wholesome humanity. He did not like anything
that tasted or smelt of Bohemianism in the personnel
of literature, but he did not mind the scent of the
new-ploughed earth, or even of the barn-yard.
I recall his telling me once that after two younger
brothers-in-letters had called upon him in the odor
of an habitual beeriness and smokiness, he opened
the window; and the very last time I saw him he remembered
at eighty-five the offence he had found on his first
visit to New York, when a metropolitan poet had asked
him to lunch in a basement restaurant.

III.

He seemed not to mind, however, climbing to the little
apartment we had in Boston when we came there in 1866,
and he made this call upon us in due form, bringing
Mrs. Holmes with him as if to accent the recognition
socially. We were then incredibly young, much
younger than I find people ever are nowadays, and
in the consciousness of our youth we felt, to the
last exquisite value of the fact, what it was to have
the Autocrat come to see us; and I believe he was
not displeased to perceive this; he liked to know
that you felt his quality in every way. That first
winter, however, I did not see him often, and in the
spring we went to live in Cambridge, and thereafter
I met him chiefly at Longfellow’s, or when I
came in to dine at the Fieldses’, in Boston.
It was at certain meetings of the Dante Club, when
Longfellow read aloud his translation for criticism,
and there was supper later, that one saw the doctor;
and his voice was heard at the supper rather than
at the criticism, for he was no Italianate. He
always seemed to like a certain turn of the talk toward
the mystical, but with space for the feet on a firm
ground of fact this side of the shadows; when it came
to going over among them, and laying hold of them
with the band of faith, as if they were substance,
he was not of the excursion. It is well known
how fervent, I cannot say devout, a spiritualist Longfellow’s
brother-in-law, Appleton, was; and when he was at
the table too, it took all the poet’s delicate
skill to keep him and the Autocrat from involving
themselves in a cataclysmal controversy upon the matter
of manifestations. With Doctor Holmes the inquiry
was inquiry, to the last, I believe, and the burden
of proof was left to the ghosts and their friends.
His attitude was strictly scientific; he denied nothing,
but he expected the supernatural to be at least as
convincing as the natural.